This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
ACKAcknowledgeAPAccess PointAWTAlternate Wireless TechnologyCNCore NetworkCPCComputer Program CodeeNBevolved Node B (e.g., LTE base station)GPSGlobal Positioning SystemIPInternet ProtocolLTELong Term EvolutionOSOperating SystemRANRadio Access NetworkTCPTransmission Control ProtocolUEUser Equipment (e.g., a wireless device)
Currently, third-party companies which identify and rent locations for deploying wireless access points or cellular towers often follow a person-intensive approach. This typically entails identifying a problem area, e.g., by examining drop call statistics. Then, a person is assigned to personally investigate and look for a location in an identified problem geographic area.
Small cells are increasingly being used, e.g., to increase capacity in certain areas. AWT typically involves adding additional access points within a macro cell coverage area that “underlay” the macro cell. The additional access points have smaller coverage than the macro cell, but can provide, e.g., additional capacity within that smaller coverage.
With small cells, the number of sites increases dramatically and each site has a smaller footprint (e.g., relative to a macro cell). Consequently, because of the increased volume of cell sites, the inefficiencies of the previous system need to be placed under greater scrutiny. Additionally, greater amounts of data are now available for data mining, which can potentially be leveraged to improve efficiency in dealing with this problem. However, upgrading cellular throughput such as by deploying additional underlay cells is an additional cost to the operator, but is not generally tightly linked to additional revenue or overall profit.
There is a need for a mechanism which enables the operator to automatically identify essentially zero risk or definitely profitable scenarios or locations for deployment of additional underlay access points.